December 2012 – Page 5 – Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Dave Brubeck

Dave Brubeck has passed beyond time signatures and time itself, ending his earthly sojourn last Wednesday a day shy of his 92nd birthday. My old college buddy Monterey Tom writes,

I don't think that you have to be either a Jazz aficionado or a musician to note Brubeck's importance in both the music world itself and in the broader culture of the 50's and 60's. His compositions, and those of his alto sax player Paul Desmond, inspired other musicians to experiment with non-traditional time signatures and tonal structures. Ironically, by performing often in college auditoria instead of night clubs and by clearly connecting his music to classical music, he put a coat-and-tie respectability to Jazz and thereby made huge numbers of young Americans aware of both the broader worlds of Jazz and modern art in general. His music was often as charming and soothing as chamber music, as joyous as that of the 1930's swingers, and as intriguing as that of the supposedly more serious innovators of the 20th Century.

Tom is much more the jazz aficionado than me, but we were both and still are Kerouac aficionados. Here is a 30 second reading, "Dave Brubeck," from Kerouac's Poetry for the Beat Generation. That's Steve Allen on piano.

The title of Take Five alludes to its 5/4 time signature. It was from the 1959 album Time Out. Wikipedia: "While "Take Five" was not the first jazz composition to use the quintuple meter, it was one of the first in the United States to achieve mainstream significance, reaching #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #5 on Billboard's Easy Listening chart in 1961, two years after its initial release." I remember hearing it in '61 from my brother-in-law Ken's car radio somewhere in the Mojave desert. Old Ken liked it. Who could not like it?

Also very accessible is Blue Rondo à la Turk in 9/8 and 4/4 time, also from Time Out. Based on a melody Brubeck heard in the streets of Istanbul.

St. Louis Blues

Legacy of a Legend

Brubeck composed sacred music and became a Roman Catholic in 1980.

Has College Become a Scam?

I am afraid it has, for many if not most. It will depend on your major, of course. Here is a list of seven institutions at which total annual costs hover around $60,000. You read that right: annual costs. What do you get for that $240 K? It is obvious that you do not get an education in any serious sense of that term. (It is also obvious that most attendees have no interest at all in an education in that sense.) Nor do you get what most people (mis)use 'education' to refer to, namely, a ticket to a high-paying job.

I went to a private college, but in my day one got value for money. I worked part-time, received a California State Scholarship, and borrowed $2,000, a debt that was quickly discharged. Those were the early days of the federally-insured loan program. The program was set up with good intentions, but it had a serious unintended consequence: it provided an incentive for administrators to hike costs for no better reason than that naive students were able to pay exorbitant tuitions by floating loans. Part of what the administrators did with all this excess money was to hire more useless overpaid administrators.

Talk of a 'scam,' though harsh, is not inaccurate. There is lot to be said on this topic. But I've got to get on to other things. So I hand off to John Stossel.

Friday Cat Blogging a Day Late: The Cat Who Feared the One Book Man

Timmy the Cat sez: "I fear the man of one book." I would add that it does not matter what that one book is, whether Aristotle's Metaphysics or Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats or the Bible. Study everything. Join nothing. Image credit: Laura Gibbs via Seldom Seen Slim.

Jeep Wrangler: Trailhead Access in Style

It was going to be either a Harley-Davidson or a Jeep Wrangler. I took the three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license. But then good sense kicked in and I sprang for a 2013 Wrangler Unlimited Sport S. I'm a hiker, not a biker. And I value my long-term physical integrity. 'Unlimited' translates to 'four door.' The longer wheel base makes for a comfortable freeway ride. The removable hard top adds to security and means a quiet ride. The new with 2012 Pentastar 3.6 liter V6 24 valve engine delivers plenty of power through either a 6-speed manual or a 5-speed automatic tranny. But it is still a lean, mean, trail machine that will get me easily into, and more importantly, out of the gnarlier trailheads.

I bought it the day after Thanksgiving and I've had it off road twice. Drove it up to Roger's Trough Trailhead in the Eastern Superstitions on Sunday where James L. and I trashed ourselves good on a seven hour hike to and from the Cliff Dwellings. Don't try to access this trailhead without a high clearance 4WD vehicle. There was one steep switchback that definitely got my attention and left me white-knuckled. And then on Wednesday, a serious off-roader showed me some Jeep trails northwest of Superior, AZ. Using walkie-talkies, he gave me a little tutorial on how to negotiate narrow, rocky trails without getting hung up or rolling over. It comes standard with a roll-bar, though. I hope not to make use of it. And I don't reckon I will be putting the front windshield down, either. Might come in handy, though, for shooting in the direction of travel . . . .

Bad Economic Reasoning About the National Debt

When I study the writings of professional economists I sometime have to shake my shaggy philosopher's head. Try this passage on for size:

$16 trillion is the amount of Treasury debt outstanding at the moment. The more relevant figure is the amount of debt the federal government owes to people and institutions other than itself. If, for some reason, I lent money to my wife and she promised to pay it back to me, we wouldn’t count that as part of the debt owed by our household. The debt owed to the public is about $10 trillion these days.

What a brainless analogy! Suppose I loan wifey 100 semolians. She issues me a 'debt instrument,' an IOU. Has the family debt increased by $100? Of course not. It is no different in principle than if I took $100 out of my left pocket, deposited an IOU there, and placed the cash in my right pocket. If I started with exactly $100 cash on my person I would end the game with exactly the same amount.

But I do not stand to the government in the same relation that I stand to my family. Suppose I buy 100 K worth of Treasury notes, thereby loaning the government that sum. Has the Federal debt increased by $100 K? Of course it has. I am not part of the government. Whether the government owes money to U. S. citizens or to the ChiComs makes no difference at all with respect to the amount of the debt. The citizens plus the government do not form a "household" in the way my wife and I form a household. Citizens and government are not all one big happy family.

The analogy is pathetic.

The author would have you think that "the more relevant figure" is $16 trillion minus $10 trillion = $6 trillion. False, because based on a false analogy.

This shows how ideologically infected the 'science' of economics is. Only a leftist ideologue could make the collectivist assumption that I have just exposed. The Marxian "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a viable principle at the level of the family, but it is pernicious nonsense on stilts when applied to the state in its relation to the citizenry.

Death Spiral States

Do you live in a death spiral state? Buying real estate or municipal bonds in such a state may prove to be a foolish move. Here is a list with each state's 'taker ratio':

Ohio 1.0
Hawaii 1.02
Illinois 1.03
Kentucky 1.05
South Carolina 1.06
New York 1.07
Maine 1.07
Alabama 1.10
California 1.39
Mississippi 1.49
New Mexico 1.53

Two factors determine whether a state makes this elite list of fiscal hellholes. The first is whether it has more takers than makers. A taker is someone who draws money from the government, as an employee, pensioner or welfare recipient. A maker is someone gainfully employed in the private sector.

[. . .]

The second element in the death spiral list is a scorecard of state credit-worthiness done by Conning & Co., a money manager known for its measures of risk in insurance company portfolios. Conning’s analysis focuses more on dollars than body counts. Its formula downgrades states for large debts, an uncompetitive business climate, weak home prices and bad trends in employment.

Given California's death spiral, why stay there? Victor Davis Hanson supplies some reasons. And I hope you Californians do stay there. Don't come to Arizona! You wouldn't like it here anyway. Too hot, too self-reliant, too 'racist' and 'xenophobic,' and every other citizen and non-citizen is packin' heat.

Traffic Surge

Today I received 4845 page views. Yesterday's tally was 2659. Why the surge? I have no idea. I don't reckon there's a whole lot of interest in constituent ontology out there in cyberland.

But I do humbly thank all and sundry, human and robotic, for their kind patronage.

Constituent Ontology and the Problem of Change

In an earlier entry I sketched the difference between constituent ontology (C-ontology) and relational ontology (R-ontology) and outlined an argument against R-ontology. I concluded that post with the claim that C-ontology also faces serious objections. One of them could be called the 'argument from change.'

The Argument from Change

Suppose avocado A, which was unripe a week ago is ripe today. This is an example of alterational (as opposed to existential) change. The avocado has become different. But it has also remained the same. It is different in respect of ripeness but it is one and the same avocado that was unripe and is now ripe.

Alterational change is neither destruction nor duplication. The ripening of an avocado does not cause it to cease to exist. The ripening of an avocado is not the ceasing to exist of one particular (the unripe avocado) followed by the coming into existence of a numerically distinct avocado (the ripe one).

It is also clear that one cannot speak of change if there are two avocados, A and B, indiscernible except in respect of ripeness/unripeness, such that A is unripe at time t while B is ripe at time t* (t*> t). If my avocado is unripe at t while yours is ripe at t*, that circumstance does not constitute a change. Alteration requires that one and the same thing have incompatible properties at different times. This is necessary for alteration; whether it is sufficient is a further question.

That there is alterational change is a datum. That it requires that one and the same thing persist over an interval of time during which it has incompatible properties follows from elementary 'exegesis' or 'unpacking' of the datum.

The question before us is whether any C-ontology can do justice to the datum and its exegesis.

All C-ontologists are committed to what Michael J. Loux calls "Constituent Essentialism." ("What is Constituent Ontology?" Novak et al. eds., p. 52) It is the C-ontological analog of mereological essentialism. We can put it like this:

Constituent Essentialism: A thing has each of its ontological parts necessarily. This implies that a thing cannot gain or lose an ontological part without ceasing to be same thing.

Mereological Essentialism: A thing has each of its commonsense parts necessarily. This implies that a thing cannot gain or lose a commonsense part without ceasing to be the same thing.

To illustrate, suppose an ordinary particular (OP) is a bundle of compresent universals. The universals are the ontological parts of the OP as a whole. The first of the two principles entails that ordinary particulars cannot change. For (alterational) change is change in respect of properties under preservation of numerical diachronic identity. But preservation of identity is not possible on Constituent Essentialism. The simple bundle-of-universals theory appears incompatible with the fact of change.

I agree with Loux that Constituent Essentialism is a "framework principle" (p. 52) of C-ontology. It cannot be abandoned without abandoning C-ontology. And of course the fact of change and what it entails (persistence of the same thing over time) cannot be denied. So the 'argument from change' does seem to score against primitive versions of the bundle-of-universals theory.

Can the Objection Be Met?

The foregoing objection can perhaps be met met by sophisticating the bundle theory and adopting a bundle-bundle theory. Call this BBT. Accordingly, a thing that persists over time such as an avocado is a diachronic bundle of synchronic or momentary bundles. The theory has two stages.

First, there is the construction of momentary bundles from universals. Thus my avocado at a time is a bundle of universals. Then there is the construction of a diachronic bundle from these synchronic bundles. The momentary bundles have universals as constituents while the diachronic bundles do not have universals as constituents, but individuals. This is because a bundle of universals at a time is an individual. At both stages the bundling is contingent: the properties are contingently bundled to form momentary bundles and these resulting bundles are contingently bundled to form the persisting thing.

Accordingly, the unripe avocado is numerically the same as the ripe avocado in virtue of the fact that the earlier momentary bundles which have unripeness as a constituent are ontological parts
of the same diachronic whole as the later momentary bundles which have ripeness as a constituent.

A sophisticated bundle theory does not, therefore, claim that a persisting thing is a bundle of properties; the claim is that a persisting thing is a bundle of individuals which are themselves bundles of properties. This disposes of the objection from change at least as formulated above.

There are of course a number of other objections that need to be considered — in separate posts. But on the problem of change C-ontology looks to be in better shape than Loux makes it out to be.

I should add that I am not defending the bundle-bundle theory. In my Existence book I take a different C-ontological tack.

Be Gracious

Does someone want to do something for you? Buy you lunch? Give you a gift? Bring something to the dinner?

Be gracious. Don't say, "You don't have to buy me lunch," or "Let me buy you lunch," or "You didn't have to bring that." Humbly accept and grant the donor the pleasure of being a donor.

Lack of graciousness often bespeaks an excess of ego.

We were re-hydrating at a bar in Tortilla Flat, Arizona, after an ankle-busting hike up a stream bed. I offered to buy Alex a drink. Instead of graciously accepting my hospitality, he had the chutzpah to ask me to lend him money so that he could buy me a drink!

Another type of ungraciousness is replying 'Thank you' to 'Thank you.' If I thank you for something, say 'You're welcome,' not 'Thank You.' Graciously acquiesce in the fact that I have done you a favor. Don't try to get the upper hand by thanking me.

I grant that there are situations in which mutual thanking is appropriate.

Some people feel that they must 'reciprocate.' Why exactly? I gave you a little Christmas present because I felt like it. And now you feel you must give me one in return? Is this a tit for tat game?

Suppose I compliment you sincerely. Will you throw the compliment back in my face by denigrating that which I complimented you for, thereby impugning my judgment?

James Kalb on the ’60s

A tip of the hat to Monterey Tom for hipping me — as we used to say in the 60s — to James Kalb's Out of the Wreckage. Excerpt:

So the Sixties led to what it thought it hated most, a consumerist, conformist, careerist, and bureaucratic lifestyle, guided by the heirs of Madison Avenue and deprived of spontaneity and close human connections. The revolution had gone nowhere. Instead of the dry martinis and marital cheating of the 1950s, we had free-floating relationships and designer beers. Instead of the creativity once promised, we had commercial pop culture that only becomes cruder and more crudely commercialized. And instead of musical rebellion, the cover of Rolling Stone now features admiring images of the President.

Ego, Sin, and Logic

Ego is at the root of sin, but also at the root of obsessive preoccupation with one's sinfulness. If the goal is to weaken the ego, then too much fretting over one's sins in the manner of a Wittgenstein is contraindicated.

There is such a thing as excessive moral scrupulosity.

Though Wittgenstein's ego drove him to scruple inordinately, he was a better man than Russell. Russell worried about logic. Wittgenstein worried about logic and his sins.

The Killer Mountains Strike Again: Jesse Capen’s Remains Found

The Superstitions are not called the Killer Mountains for nothing. Many a man has been lured to his death in this rugged wilderness by lust for gold. A few days ago, what appear to be the remains of Jesse Capen were finally found after nearly three years of searching. Another obsessive Dutchman Hunter in quest of a nonexistent object, he went missing in December of 2009.

I've seen the movie and it ain't bad. And of course any self-respecting aficionado of the legends and lore, tales and trails of the magnificent Superstitions must see it. Tom Kollenborn comments in Lust for Gold I and Lust for Gold II.

As I wrote in Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold,

. . . to live well, a man needs a quest. Without a quest, a life lacks the invigorating "strenuosity" that William James preached. But if he quests for something paltry such as lost treasure, it is perhaps best that he never find it. For on a finite quest, the 'gold' is in the seeking, not in the finding. A quest worthy of us, however, cannot be for gold or silver or anything finite and transitory. A quest worthy of us must aim beyond the ephemeral, towards something whose finding would complete rather than debilitate us. Nevertheless, every quest has something in it of the ultimate quest, and can be respected in some measure for that reason.

Of Rice and Race

Victor Davis Hanson on Susan Rice:

We are asked to believe that a multimillionaire African-American woman, who boasts that those who “mess” with her end up badly, is a victim of racism for not being welcomed as a nominee for secretary of state — a position that has not been held by a white male in 15 years — after she went on five television shows the Sunday after the Benghazi attack in an effort to convince Americans of the absurd myth that their ambassador had been killed in the course of a demonstration gone bad, rather than being murdered in a preplanned al-Qaedist hit.

Politics is War and Conservatives Need to Learn How to Fight

The Left accepts and lives by what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means. (Von Clausewitz's famous remark was to the effect that war is politics conducted by other means.) The party that ought to be opposing the Left, the Republicans, apparently does not believe that this is what politics is. This puts them at a serious disadvantage.

David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their
heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.

Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An
Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

Because politics is war, conservatives, if they want to win, must deploy the same tactics the lefties
deploy. Joe SixPack does not watch C-Span or read The Weekly Standard. He won't sit still for Newt Gingrich as this former history professor calmly articulates conservative principles. Joe needs to be fired up and energized. The Left understands this. You will remember that the race-hustling poverty pimp Jesse Jackson never missed an opportunity to refer to Gingrich's "Contract with America" as "Contract ON America." That outrageous slander was of course calculated and was effective. Leftists know how to fight dirty, and therefore the 'high road' is the road to political nowhere in present circumstances, as the 2012 election showed. The nice man Romney was just no match for the street fighter Obama and the slander machine behind him.

The fundamental problem, I am afraid, is that there is no longer any common ground. When people stand on common ground, they can iron out their inevitable differences in a civil manner within the context of shared assumptions. But when there are no longer any (or many) shared assumptions, then politics does become a form of warfare in which your opponent is no longer a fellow citizen committed to
similar values, but an enemy who must be destroyed (if not physically, at least in respect of his political power) if you and your way of life are to be preserved.

As I have said before, the bigger and more intrusive the government, the more to fight over. If we could reduce government to its legitimate constitutionally justified functions, then we could reduce the amount of fighting. But of course the size, scope, and reach of government is precisely one of the issues most hotly debated.

Although I incline toward the Horowitz view, I am not entirely comfortable with it. I would like to believe that amicable solutions are available. You will have to decide for yourself, taking into consideration the particulars of your situation. Some of us are buying gold and 'lead.' I suspect things are going to get hot in the years to to come, and I'm not talking about global warming. Things are about to get very interesting indeed.

Constituent Ontology Versus Relational Ontology and an Argument Against the Latter

Two Different Aproaches to Ontology

Uncontroversially, ordinary material particulars such as cats and cups have parts, material parts. Equally uncontroversial is that they have properties and stand in relations. That things have properties and stand in relations is a plain Moorean fact. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup. So far we are at the 'datanic,' pre-philosophical level. We start philosophizing when we ask what properties are and what it is for a thing to have a property. So the philosophical question is not whether there are properties — of course there are! — but what they are. Neither is it a philosophical question whether things have properties — of course they do! The question concerns how this having is to be understood.

For example, is the blueness of my cup a universal or a particular (e.g.,a trope)? That is one of several questions one can ask about properties. A second is whether the cup has the property by standing in a relation to it — the relation of exemplification — or by containing it as an ontological or metaphysical part or constituent. Can property-possession be understood quasi-mereologically?

It is this second question that will exercise me in this post.

At a first approximation, the issue that divides constituent ontologists (C-ontologists) and those that N. Wolterstorff rather infelicitously calls 'relational ontologists' (R-ontologists) is whether or not ordinary particulars have ontological or metaphysical parts. C-ontologists maintain that ordinary particulars have such parts, and that among these parts are (some of) the properties of the ordinary particular. R-ontologists deny that ordinary particulars have ontological parts, and consequently deny that ordinary particulars have any of their properties by having them as parts.

Bundle theories are clear examples of C-ontology. If my cup is nothing more than a bundle of compresent properties, then (i) it has parts that are not ordinary physical parts, and (ii) its properties are these parts. The properties could be either universals or particulars (tropes, say). Either way you have a constituent ontology.

Suppose you think that there has to be more to an ordinary particular than its properties suitably bundled. You might reason as follows. If properties are universals, and it is possible that there be two numerically distinct particulars that share all property consituents, then there must be an additional constituent that accounts for their numerical difference. Enter bare or thin particulars. Such substratum theories also count as C-ontologies.

Hylomorphic theories are also examples of C-ontology. The form of a thing is not a property external to it to which the thing is related by exemplification or instantiation, and this is a fortiori true of its matter, whether proximate or prime. It follows that form and matter are ontological constituents of ordinary particulars.

The notion that ordinary particulars have ontological parts in addition to their commonsense parts is admittedly not the clearest. 'Part' in exactly what sense? So it is no surprise that many of the best analytic metaphysicians are R-ontologists. These philosophers think of properties as abstract objects residing in a realm apart. Having decided on that view of properties, they naturally conclude that it makes no sense to maintain that a coffee cup, say, could have causally inert, nonspatiotemporal abstract objects as constituents. So they maintain that for a concrete thing to have a property is for it to stand in a exemplification relation or tie or nexus to an abstract property. According to Michael J. Loux, relational ontologists

. . . restrict the parts of ordinary objects to their commonsense parts. Nonetheless, they insist that ordinary objects stand in a variety of significant nonmereological connexions or ties to things that have character kath auto or nonderivatively; and they tell us that in virtue of doing so those objects have whatever character they do. ("What is Constituent Ontology?" in Novak et al. eds. Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag 2012, p. 44, emphasis added)

Why I am Inclined to Reject Relational Ontology

What follows is a sketch of argumentation more rigorously presented, with the standard scholarly apparatus, in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002, pp. 170 -176, "Rejection of Nonconstituent Realism."

1. The 'Nude Particular' Objection

Relational ontologists don't deny that things have properties; what they deny is that those properties are at or in the things that have them in a way that would justify talk of properties being special metaphysical parts of ordinary concrete things. They maintain that properties are abstracta in a realm apart, and that things are related to them. Hence the phrase 'relational ontology.' It seems to me, however, that on this view of properties and property-possession, ordinary particulars turn out to be what I will call 'nude particulars.'

Nude particulars are similar to, but not to be confused with, Gustav Bergmann's bare particulars or David Armstrong's thin particulars. Bare and thin particulars are constituents of ordinary or thick particulars. Nude particulars are not ontological constituents of anything. A nude particular is an ordinary particular all of whose properties are abstracta. Like bare particulars, nude particulars lack natures. Lacking natures, there is nothing about them that dictates which properties they have. This won't stop an R-ontologist from speaking of essential properties. He will say that an essential property of x is a property x has in every possible world in which it exists. He cannot say, however, that what grounds this circumstance is that ordinary particulars as he conceives them have natures in them or at them.

I maintain that (i) R-ontologists are committed to nude particulars, but that (ii) there are no such critters. Certainly, the meso-particulars that surround me now are not nude. My trusty coffee cup, for example, is blue at this time and in this place.

The cup is blue, and I see (with my eyes) that it is blue. This seeing is not a visio intellectualis, after all, a 'seeing' wth the 'eye of the mind,' as would befit the inspection of some colorless, atemporal, nonspatial, abstract Platonic object in a realm insulated from the flux and shove of the real order. It is a seeing with the eyes of the head. When I see the cup's being blue, I am not seeing a state of affairs that spans the abyss separating concreta from abstracta; I am seeing a state of affairs that is itself concrete.

Moreover, I see blue (or blueness), again with my eyes. (How could I see that the cup is blue without seeing blue?) It is therefore phenomenologically evident that at least some of the properties of my trusty cup are empirically detectable via ordinary outer perception. But they wouldn't be empirically detectable if they were abstract objects in a realm apart, a Platonic or quasi-Platonic topos ouranos. Empirical detection involves causation; abstracta, however, are causally inert. Therefore, at least some of a thing's properties are at it or in it, and in this sense ontological constituents of it. If so, R-ontology is mistaken.

The empirically detectable properties of an ordinary particular cannot be stripped from it and installed in a realm of abstracta. For then what you would have here below would be a nude particular.

You might object that I have made a travesty of the R-ontologist's position. After all, doesn't Loux in the bolded passage above imply that ordinary particulars have "character" where they are, namely, in the sensible world and that they are therefore not nude? If this is the response that is made to my first objection, then it triggers my

2. Duplication Objection

Suppose the R-ontologist grants that my cup has the character blue (or blueness) and other empirical features at the cup, and that this character can be seen with the eyes of the head, and is therefore not a denizen of a realm of abstracta separated by an ontological chasm from the realm of concreta. I will then ask what work abstract properties do. Why do we need them if the blueness and hardness and so on of the cup are already right here at or in the cup? What is the point of positing 'duplicates' of these empirical characters in a realm of abstracta? They are explanatorily otiose.

The R-ontologist appears to face a dilemma. Either he must say that my coffee cup is a nude particular in denial of the plain fact that the blueness of the cup is an empirically detectable feature at the cup and not a colorless abstract object in a realm apart; or, denying that the cup is nude, he must admit that his abstract properties are explanatorily idle and fit candidates for Occam's Razor.

3. Conclusion

Can we infer that C-ontology is in the clear? Not so fast! Loux brings powerful arguments against it, arguments to be considered in a separate post. My suspicion is that that both styles of ontology lead to insurmountable aporiai.